dark, the crocodile came to life again, and padded noiselessly about the passage on its scaly paws seeking for its prey, with its great cruel jaws snapping, its fierce teeth gleaming, and its horny tail lashing savagely from side to side.  It was also a matter of common knowledge that the favourite article of diet of crocodiles was a little boy with bare legs in a white suit.  Even should one be fortunate enough to escape the crocodile’s jaws, there were countless other terrors awaiting the traveller down this awe-inspiring passage.  A little farther on there was a dark lobby, with cupboards surrounding it.  Any one examining these cupboards by daylight would have found that they contained innocuous cricket-bats and stumps, croquet-mallets and balls, and sets of bowls.  But as soon as the shades of night fell, these harmless sporting accessories were changed by some mysterious and malign agency into grizzly bears, and grizzly bears are notoriously the fiercest of their species.  It was advisable to walk very quickly, but quietly, past the lair of the grizzlies, for they would have gobbled up a little boy in one second.  Immediately after the bears’ den came the culminating terror of all—­the haunt of the wicked little hunchbacks.  These malignant little beings inhabited an arched and recessed cross-passage.  It was their horrible habit to creep noiselessly behind their victims, tip...tip...tip-toeing silently but swiftly behind their prey, and then ... with a sudden spring they threw themselves on to little boys’ backs, and getting their arms round their necks, they remorselessly throttled the life out of them.  In the early “sixties” there was a perfect epidemic of so-called “garrotting” in London.  Harmless citizens proceeding peaceably homeward through unfrequented streets or down suburban roads at night were suddenly seized from behind by nefarious hands, and found arms pressed under their chins against their windpipe, with a second hand drawing their heads back until they collapsed insensible, and could be despoiled leisurely of any valuables they might happen to have about them.  Those familiar with John Leech’s Punch Albums will recollect how many of his drawings turned on this outbreak of garrotting.  The little boy had heard his elders talking about this garrotting, and had somehow mixed it up with a story about hunchbacks and the fascinating local tales about “the wee people,” but the terror was a very real one for all that.  The hunchbacks baffled, there only remained a dark archway to pass, but this archway led to the “Robbers’ Passage.”  A peculiarly bloodthirsty gang of malefactors had their fastnesses along this passage, but the dread of being in the immediate neighbourhood of such a band of desperadoes was considerably modified by the increasing light, as the solitary oil-lamp of the passage was approached.  Under the comforting beams of this lamp the little boy would pause until his heart began to thump less wildly after his deadly